Why Tony Abbott looks forward to global warming: more beach days

"Climate change itself is probably doing good; or at least, more good than harm [and] .. a gradual lift in global temperatures ... might even be beneficial": Tony Abbott.

Mr Abbott is right, of course.

Former PM Tony Abbott is congratulated after finishing the 2km swim in the Sydney Morning Herald Cole Classic at Manly in February.Credit:Salty Dingo

A spot of global warming has many benefits, not least of which means a man would get a lot more lovely warm days to disport himself on the beach in his smugglers.

The beach itself is likely to get a lot closer, even if, as Mr Abbott mourns, it's taking its good time. A hundred years of pictures and Manly beach has barely changed, he says. You can hear him urging it to hurry up.

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Mr Abbott competing in a charity swim in 2010, after which his budgie smugglers were auctioned on eBay.Credit:Greg Sewell

Proper sea level rises could have the ocean lapping at a fellow's front door. A whoopsy-doodle off the porch and you'll be swimming with the fishes right away.

Talking about fishes. Life in the previously cooler climes would be vastly more colourful, with parrotfish, lovely big-lipped wrasses and coral trout leaping about as they search for a new home, having abandoned what was the Great Barrier Reef before it expired of global warming and Adani.

Mr Abbott, who trained as a priest until he comprehended his destiny was to abandon the cassock and reveal on a beach near you how he was created 'in the image and likeness of God', clearly knows his Bible well.

That bit about us forgetting the important Biblical precept about subduing the earth?

Illustration: Matt Golding

That's from Genesis: "Then God said, 'Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth'."

You've got to hand it to him. Who else could get the Inquisition, the danger of voting, the thought police and science into the one compelling paragraph? Apart, of course, from Lord Monckton and Andrew Bolt?

"Beware the pronouncement, 'the science is settled'," he cried. "It's the spirit of the Inquisition, the thought police, down the ages. Almost as bad is the claim that '99 per cent of scientists believe', as if scientific truth is determined by votes rather than facts."

If only the truth about Mr Abbott's period as prime minister hadn't been determined by a party-room vote.

We'd still have a national leader who thinks global warming is a fine aspiration for the frozen, huddled masses.

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Instead, we've got a lost boy aimlessly wandering the earth in search of an audience, his vision revealed in all its splendour – which is to say, without even a pair of pants.